Tag: pub

A pub has installed a Faraday cage to stop punters using their mobile phones and annoying everyone by shouting their location into them or by constantly looking at their messages.

Steve Tyler of the Gin Tub, in Hove, East Sussex, is hoping customers will be encouraged to actually talk to each other as a result of his initiative.

He has installed metal mesh in the walls and ceiling of the bar which absorbs and redistributes the electromagnetic signals from phones and wireless devices to prevents them entering the interior of the building.

The method was discovered in 1836 by Michael Faraday although it is not clear who was using a mobile phone at that point in history.

The idea is used in power plants or other highly charged environments to prevent shocks or interference with other electronic equipment. Some wallets are now cloaked in a similar flexible mesh to prevent data and credit card theft.

Tyler said he wanted to force “people to interact in the real world” and remember how to socialise.

“I just wanted people to enjoy a night out in my bar, without being interrupted by their phones,” he said.

Normally you dont have to worry about drinks that don’t touch the sides, but we would be careful going near the walls during a lightning storm.

A Seattle bar owner has hit on a wizard wheeze for some free publicity for his bar – he has banned Google Glasses from being seen there.

Dave Meinert, owner of the 5 Point, admits that his bar is not the best of joints and a lot of his customers have a lot of reasons for not wanting to be noticed.

So he has decided to ban Project Glass spectacles from his pub, claiming that they are an infringement of privacy.

Meinert found himself on the pundit circuit this weel after he posted a message on its Facebook page this week saying that 5 Point was the first Seattle business to ban in advance Google Glasses. “And ass kickings will be encouraged for violators.”

The pub’s owner suddenly found himself speaking on the Luke Burbank Show at KIRO-FM.

“You have to understand the culture of the 5 Point, which is a sometimes seedy, maybe notorious place. People want to go there and be not known … and definitely don’t want to be secretly filmed or videotaped and immediately put on the internet,” he said.

He said that the pub does not let people film other people or take photos unwanted of people in the bar, because it is a private place that people go.

5 Point is near Amazon, and acknowledges that while “tech geeks” have been known to patronise the bar, they will not be allowed to wear them inside.

All this would be fair enough if Google had actually released its Google Glass project to the great unwashed. We doubt that either Meinert nor anyone in his bar has ever seen a set in action. Still nothing like free publicity when you are a self-confessed seedy bar.

Sheepish boffins have admitted that an important report on the melting of glaciers was largely nicked from a students report on what he did on his holidays and a mountaineering magazine article which both depended on asking a man in a pub.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the headlines with a warning about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops.

In its recent report, IPCC stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming and it claimed that two papers were the source of the information.

However one of the sources turned out to be a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on someone asking mountaineers questions in a pub.

According to the The Telegraph, the other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland.

This also involved interviews with very thirsty mountain guides in the Alpine watering holes.

The fact that the IPCC has been using unsubstantiated claims and sources for its warnings, sceptics have cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have dubbed the panel a joke.

After all there was no way that current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s.